34 tools for agencies to be more productive and scale their businesses

There are so many tools out there for digital marketing agencies to choose from—in fact, that bumper crop can become a little annoying. Since we’re all in this together for the shared goal of saving time and working smarter, we’ve curated a master list of tools for digital agencies. These tools will help you and your team be more productive, whether you’re creating ads or managing your agency’s social presence.

Ad management tools
—

There’s nothing wrong with Google Analytics, and you should use them. But they’re not the only game in town! Each agency has a unique set of clients, and because of that, a unique set of demands. You can best target each client’s niche audience using tools that have more advanced features and specific functions.

Epom

Epom is all about “intelligent ads,” allowing you to monetize ad campaigns across various platforms using insights from social habits, search data, and other “smart” guidance. It offers different levels of service depending on how much support you need. Use Epom for things like assessing a campaign’s performance by generating analytical reports, configuring ad campaigns, optimizing existing campaigns and setting up traffic options.

Hootsuite Ads

Hootsuite and Facebook worked together on Hootsuite Ads to create an automated Facebook ad generator. Use this tool to automatically identify their best posts and then find the best places to advertise them so you can get more from their promoted Facebook posts. Since Facebook is still pretty much the biggest game in town, you’re almost certainly on it with your clients, and this tool will help you ensure you’re making the most of that presence.

Kissmetrics

Kissmetrics analytics tools are among the best out there, and will help you optimize your website and get more conversions. Use Kissmetrics to fine-tune your sales funnel, track visitors to your site at each point in their conversion journey, and generate reports on each aspect of the conversion process.

SEMrush

Although many people think SEMrush is just about SEO, it’s also awesome (and our pick) for pay-per-click insights. Use the tool’s intelligence suite to generate analytics reports that show you everything from keyword difficulty, competitor strategies, and domain strengths, so you get the most out of your ads.

Content marketing tools
—

Did you hear the one about the digital marketing agency that let their client’s content marketing slide? We didn’t either—because it doesn’t work! Here are some great content marketing tools.

Curata

Curata is especially useful because you can use it for both content marketing and content curation. The Curata content marketing tool lets you analyze your content to see what’s working most effectively and track leads. The content curation tool allows you to identify the best content using its “self-learning” search engine, curate content you choose and easily publish the content you eventually push through, either on your CMS or on Curata’s optimized blog.

Verblio

Verblio is a writing service that provides high-quality blog articles, press releases, website content and more for reasonable prices. What’s better is they have specific tools designed for agencies who are looking to outsource copywriting for their clients. They have writers who are experts in many leading industries and offer white-label features that allow you to produce content at scale.

Feedly

Feedly lets you pull together content from all over the web based on keywords or topic, because it is an RSS reader. That just means it grabs items from many websites, blogs, news sources and other locations automatically, and puts them into a list that looks like an email inbox for each keyword or topic. Your agency might have “digital marketing tips and tricks” or “content marketing” feeds, for example, and you can set up in advance any sites and blogs you already know are great and make sure those are on your list. When you find a great piece of content, you don’t have to act right away; you can save it for sharing later.

Pocket

Pocket is sort of the simplest version of a curation tool. It just lets you save things you run across online in your “pocket” so you can use them later. It’s especially great when you’re on your smartphone and pushed for time.

Customer relationship management tools
—

Managing the customer relationship is one of the most important aspects of digital marketing, and these tools keep it as simple as possible.

Aiva Labs

Aiva Labs uses AI to optimize the conversion process and ensure your clients’ sites are mobile-responsive, eliminating the need for your team to optimize onsite campaigns and create mobile iterations every time. If your team is worn out from endless multi-variate testing, but you know how important optimizing every piece of the puzzle for conversion is, Aiva Labs is for you.

Batchbook

If you have ever felt a little overwhelmed as you try to manage everything from email to social messaging to phone calls to your team’s internal project management communications, Batchbook may be the communications centralizing tool that can ease your pain. This tool really keeps your team engaged because you can use the Batchbook task system to assign tasks; need someone to follow up with new leads or get back with customers who haven’t been in touch recently? This is a great way to do it. Batchbook offers a freemium option as well as higher-end, yet still low-cost, version of their CRM system.

BuzzStream

If part of your CRM effort is tracking and reaching out to influencers in your niche, ditch your emails and spreadsheets and use BuzzStream. This tool automatically tracks your conversations with contacts and updates your lists.

HubSpot CRM

For a real-time look at your entire sales pipeline, it’s hard to beat HubSpot CRM. Real-time lets you know who needs what, as soon as they need it, so you can address pain points before they’re gone. It’s user-friendly, and the customer service is on point. Bonus: HubSpot also offers a lot of social tools, the whole platform is integrated.

Podio

Podio is a cloud-based tool for team/client integration and collaboration on projects. Its automated workflows and relationship fields make Podio especially nice to use, and its simple user interface integrates easily with tools like Box, Mailchimp, and Google Drive, so you can customize it to match up with your CRM needs. Podio is optimized for mobile and tablet use, yet it is still a robust system for managing even a lot of customer data from billing to conversations.

Unbounce

Unbounce is an effective, easy to use tool for creating the best landing page for every project. As you design, develop, test and tweak new pages, Unbounce helps keep you aimed in the right direction, even if design isn’t your forte. In fact, if you’re a beginner you can use Unbounce templates to get started, and modify them to get the best possible landing page.

Efficiency/project management tools
—

Great project management is a huge piece of digital marketing, and there are more and more awesome tools out there to make it happen. Here are some of our favorites.

Basecamp

Basecamp is one of the OGs of project management at this point, but it’s still among the best. Its central functions include assignable to-do lists and tasks you can share with clients, file sharing so you always have the latest version, chatting via campfire, messaging on projects, automatic check-in requests so your milestones don’t go unnoticed, and scheduling through its integrated calendar functions. Basecamp is easy to use for team members and clients alike, a huge benefit.

Content Snare

If your clients take a more active role in content creation, Content Snare may be the right PM tool for you. It is designed for collaborative content creation, and to eliminate endless back and forth email chains. It also allows you to create content templates that work with your agency’s business. If you need to assign tasks not only to team members but to clients too (without losing them), this is a great way to do that.

Samepage

Samepage takes a lot of the best features you might have enjoyed in other tools like Asana, Basecamp and Trello, and brings them together in a simple way. It offers a very complete version of project management, with everything from content templates to calendars to client notes to project review.

Slack

Slack is a great tool for agencies that have team communication as their number one goal, because it allows your team to communicate together and in smaller groups instant message style. It does allow for functions like document sharing, but its main functionality is lightweight, smooth communication that integrates well regardless of the device you use, no matter where you’re located.

Teamwork

Teamwork is another great option for complex project management. It offers reporting features, task dependencies, milestones, automatically recurring tasks, multiple people assigned to tasks, time tracking and lots of integrations with other tools. It also provides a great high-level overview of entire projects, including what’s still to come and what has already been completed.

Zoom

Zoom helps you with online meetings by offering high-quality sound and HD support. You can also have up to 500 participants, so you could have a meeting with many remote workers at the same time. This is a great way to make sure your remote workers get the same information at the same time. Zoom also offers several collaboration features and smart screen sharing, making it easy to display your message to all participants.

Organization/scheduling tools
—

Your clients don’t have all day! (Hey, no one does.) Here are some organization and scheduling tools to help your digital agency work it out.

Calendly

Calendly makes it easy for your leads to book meetings with your team. No one wants to keep demon dialing or play email tag to get this done.

HubSpot Calendar

With HubSpot Calendar you can schedule meetings that integrate right into HubSpot. It’s user friendly, and your clients and leads will love its simple interface. It sends out reminders for meetings and tasks, and keeps time open for specific purposes, like meeting with new prospects.

Time Doctor

Time Doctor helps you accurately track where time is spent in your business, making sure everyone is working on projects they need to be working on. Time Doctor tracks the total time worked by each person on your team, breaks down how much time is spent on different projects, tasks, or with certain clients. The best part is the data is accurate to the second.

People tools
—

You may have heard that people who need people are the luckiest people in the world. However, people who know how to find the right people are actually the luckiest. Here are some people-finding tools, because it’s better if you don’t need to rely on luck alone.

99designs

Digital marketing and great design go hand in hand. Unfortunately, when you’re managing a stable of clients with diverse products and services, creating websites, apps, and advertising collateral for them can be a tremendous design challenge. Fortunately, you can tap into a huge pool of professional designer talent using 99designs.

99designs is your source for designers with the skill and talent to help you market, whether you are an agency that specializes in app development and has a need for overflow design work, or you do SEO but want to service the client who needs an updated logo and web design. If you need professional levels of artistic creativity and quality, but a full-time graphic designer’s salary is not in your agency’s budget, 99designs is the solution. Many users find a designer they end up using on many projects, while others like to play the field, running contests for discrete projects and choosing their favorites from dozens of submissions.

day100

day100 is a site for hiring talent that offers something that’s hard to find: the insight that comes from knowing the person. It does this by offering deep data sourced from actual humans, so you can get to know prospective hires. That’s the point of the name: the idea is you’ll feel you’ve known the candidates for 100 days, so you can feel confident you’ve chosen the right person for the job.

eMarketing Silo

eMarketing Silo is all about finding and listing jobs in the digital marketing niche. It features a database and lots of postings as well as some resources like interview questions and candidate lead generation. The site doesn’t just provide its own listings, it also aggregates posts from major online job search locations, so within the digital marketing niche it can be very useful.

Hired

Hired offers a high-end pipeline for technical talent, including some of the best data scientists, software engineers, and UX designers in the US. Companies like Amex and Twitter use Hired, so you know they’re doing something right. If you’re searching for a high-tech hire and you’ve got a budget to match, this is the place to look.

SEO tools
—

Help your clients get optimized with the best SEO tools out there.

Ahrefs

Ahrefs still has some of the best keyword data out there, bar none. It allows you to go deeper with each of your SEO metrics and offers some of the most helpful insights. Ahrefs also provides domain-based content, keyword, link, and traffic reports that digital marketers can use for everything from lead generation to content marketing.

Moz Pro

Moz Pro gives you a range of insightful SEO functionalities in one tool that’s based online. Conduct site audits, use social data and metrics to analyze page failures and successes, track keyword and page rank, and monitor domain authority and visibility, to name a few functions. If you want to target keywords with a laser sight and take optimization to the next level, Moz Pro is your tool.

Soovle

Soovle is one of the best free keyword research tools going, and it’s simple. Just type your query into the search bar as if you’re Googling something, and the tool will show you related search terms from all of the big search engines and Wikipedia. They’ll be ranked in order of popularity, too.

Varvy

Varvy is a low budget option for those who want to SEO like they’ve got Moz Pro. It’s not as comprehensive or streamlined, but it will let you get started with an overview of your site’s SEO, and give you advice about making it better, for free.

Social media tools
—

Is your digital marketing firm crushing it on social? If not, maybe you just need better tools.

Agorapulse

Manage the three social biggies, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, in one place with Agorapulse. Use it to schedule posts, view analytics, run competitions, moderate comments on posts, post and monitor quizzes, and more.

Buffer

If you’re basically drowning under an ocean of social that needs managing, Buffer is a quick fix with a lot of capabilities. Buffer lets you edit photos, view your analytics, queue your posts, and even use several third-party extensions and collaborate in groups—and you can do all of these things across the usual suspects among social platforms.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social is still one of the best platforms for social media engagement and management. It lets you compare yourself with competitors and generate great looking reports with your own logo. You can also customize your inbox and the search feature is excellent. All around easy to use, for a good price.

We hope you enjoyed our list of best agency tools to be more productive. Now that you’re all out of excuses, get out there and choose the best tools for your agency!

The author

Karla Lant is a freelance writer, author, journalist and editor, and an adjunct professor. She focuses on science, technology, and technical writing. She likes to build robots and bake bread in her spare time.